himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and
Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the
socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how completely
he had got free from the influence of the established Churches of his
day. For three years he kept pouring forth pamphlets--some of them
elaborate treatises in size and intellectual rank, but still essentially
the pamphlets and manifestoes of a born agitator--on social evolution,
religion, life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The
Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the Dresden
insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the last drum tap.

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the proclamation
summing up Wagner as "a politically dangerous person" may be consulted
to this day. The pamphlets are now accessible to English readers in the
translation of Mr. Ashton Ellis. This being so, any person who, having
perhaps heard that I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my
interpretation of The Rhine Gold is only "my socialism" read into the
works of a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to
make an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your consideration
as an ignoramus.

If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do not
forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it
is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is
unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by
putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the
less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and
therefore interesting to us. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does
not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and
Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant
Man. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship,
and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart,
to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man,
and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one. As to Fricka,
who stands for State Law, she does not assume her allegorical character
in The Rhine Gold at all, but is simply Wotan's wife and Freia's sister:
nay, she contradicts her allegorical self by conniving at all Wotan's
rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law wo